Sky-High Athletics: UNC Spends $125,000 on Private Planes for Recruiting

To reach far-flung towns, private planes can be indispensable. The University of North Carolina system, for instance, has an air fleet to shuttle doctors around the state. UNC Air Operations expands the reach of high-quality health care to remote parts of the state and allows doctors to train medical students while still practicing medicine.

The flights, however, aren’t only used for health care. Though UNC Air’s website only mentions medical flights, UNC athletics coaches and high-ranking UNC officials also take flights, often for athletics recruiting or for meetings.

A Martin Center review of public records found that, from September 2018 to August 2019, the UNC-Chapel Hill athletics department was billed $125,825 for UNC Air trips and the UNC system office was billed $71,578. Many of those flights were for trips within a two-hour drive or to large cities serviced by commercial airlines.

In total, athletics and administrative flights made up about 27 percent of the roughly $725,000 in flight expenses, while about 65 percent of UNC Air’s costs were for medical flights. A service created to expand health care access in North Carolina has expanded into a perk for top officials and coaches funded by student tuition payments and taxpayer money.

UNC isn’t unique in using private planes for athletics purposes. As ESPN reported in August, at least 20 public universities own small planes for school business and many others use charter flights hired through a private service.

UNC Air has four planes and four pilots, Alan Wolf, news director for UNC Health Care, said in an email. Administratively, it falls under the North Carolina Area Health Education Centers program. “Since the NC AHEC program started, the planes have been available for university business, including athletics,” Wolf said.

And those planes are used often. In flight logs, football coach Mack Brown and former women’s basketball coach Sylvia Hatchell were among the most common names listed. Brown took at least 22 flights while Hatchell, who resigned in April, caught 17.

Brown and Hatchell took trips to Cincinnati, Ohio; Pensacola and Jacksonville, Florida; Chicago, Illinois; and Washington, DC. Their flights came with a premium price tag: A flight Hatchell took in January 2019 to Baltimore cost $1,360 round-trip. A Cincinnati flight in October 2018 was $2,240 round-trip. Despite many commercial options, the athletics department opted for private flights.

Coaches didn’t only fly to far-flung cities, however. Brown flew to cities in North Carolina within 150 miles, saving time but driving up costs. Public records show flights to Wilmington, Greenville, Pikeville (near Goldsboro), Winston-Salem, Charlotte, and Fayetteville—which is a 90-minute drive from Raleigh. At least 18 flights were to cities in North Carolina, eight of them to Charlotte.

Brown’s roundtrip flight from Raleigh to Fayetteville in January 2019 was $480. Another January 2019 flight to Charlotte was $560. In-state trips per passenger, according to invoices, could cost $800 or more.

UNC officials say that private flights are standard for big-time college athletics.

“Many Division I universities use private flights to recruit, and UNC Air Operations is an important tool to help us find, visit and ultimately sign great students,” Robbi Evans, the associate athletic director for strategic communications at UNC, said in an email.

Evans isn’t wrong, either. “Universities often use planes for athletic recruiting, mostly football and basketball, and to shuttle administrators on trips to woo donors or lobby lawmakers,” ESPN noted. UNC isn’t an outlier in its use of private flights.

To officials, the cost is worth the time saved. “It’s much quicker to fly to those destinations than to drive,” Evans said. “In some scenarios, a coach might be trying to fit a recruiting trip around practice—or may need to get to multiple cities in one day.”

The flight logs reviewed by the Martin Center, however, were rarely for multi-city trips. Brown had a few hectic days, such as January 28, 2019, when he flew from Raleigh to Elizabeth City and Rocky Mount, then back to Raleigh. But most flights were one-city stops.

And with such large coaching staffs—14 coaches and advisors for football and 10 for women’s basketball—a few missed practices might not be a disaster.

Men’s basketball is conspicuously absent in UNC Air’s records. That might be due to donor aircraft. One February 2019 invoice noted that a donor lent their private plane to UNC athletics, but it’s unclear how often donor aircraft are used.

UNC officials argue that private flights are standard for big-time college athletics.

“Football and men’s basketball coaches have used other private flights through donations,” Evans said. But because those donations go through the Rams Club, the private athletic booster club, they are not legally required to say how often donor flights have been used. “Those numbers are not publicly available,” he said.

UNC’s defense of its private flights is similar to most colleges. When journalist Lucas Daprile looked at the University of South Carolina’s private plane use for The State, he found that the school had spent almost $2 million over the last five years for private flights, usually for fundraising and athletic recruiting.

A spokesman for USC told him that the flights are “the most efficient use of staff time…It helps us raise money. It helps us get grant funding.”

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Colleges Dupe Parents and Taxpayers

Walter E. Williams
  
Colleges have been around for centuries. College students have also been around for centuries. Yet, college administrators assume that today’s students have needs that were unknown to their predecessors. Those needs include diversity and equity personnel, with massive budgets to accommodate.

According to Minding the Campus, Penn State University’s Office of Vice Provost for Educational Equity employs 66 staff members. The University of Michigan currently employs a diversity staff of 93 full-time diversity administrators, officers, directors, vice provosts, deans, consultants, specialists, investigators, managers, executive assistants, administrative assistants, analysts and coordinators. Amherst College, with a student body of 1,800 students employs 19 diversity people. Top college diversity bureaucrats earn salaries six figures, in some cases approaching $500,000 per year. In the case of the University of Michigan, a quarter (26) of their diversity officers earn annual salaries of more than $100,000. If you add generous fringe benefits and other expenses, you could easily be talking about $13 million a year in diversity costs. The Economist reports that University of California, Berkeley, has 175 diversity bureaucrats.

Diversity officials are a growing part of a college bureaucracy structure that outnumbers faculty by 2 to 2.5 depending on the college. According to “The Campus Diversity Swarm,” an article from Mark Pulliam, a contributing editor at Law and Liberty, which appeared in the City Journal (10/10/2018), diversity people assist in the cultivation of imaginary grievances of an ever-growing number of “oppressed” groups. Pulliam writes: “The mission of campus diversity officers is self-perpetuating. Affirmative action (i.e., racial and ethnic preferences in admissions) leads to grievance studies. Increased recognition of LGBTQ rights requires ever-greater accommodation by the rest of the student body. Protecting ‘vulnerable’ groups from ‘hate speech’ and ‘microaggressions’ requires speech codes and bias-response teams (staffed by diversocrats). Complaints must be investigated and adjudicated (by diversocrats). Fighting ‘toxic masculinity’ and combating an imaginary epidemic of campus sexual assault necessitate consent protocols, training, and hearing procedures — more work for an always-growing diversocrat cadre. Each newly recognized problem leads to a call for more programs and staffing.”

Campus diversity people have developed their own professional organization — the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education. They hold annual conferences — the last one in Philadelphia. The NADOHE has developed standards for professional practice and a political agenda, plus a Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, which is published by the American Psychological Association.

One wonders just how far spineless college administrators will go when it comes to caving in to the demands of campus snowflakes who have been taught that they must be protected against words, events and deeds that do not fully conform to their extremely limited, narrow-minded beliefs built on sheer delusion. Generosity demands that we forgive these precious snowflakes and hope that they eventually grow up. The real problem is with people assumed to be grown-ups — college professors and administrators — who serve their self-interest by tolerating and giving aid and comfort to our aberrant youth. Unless the cycle of promoting and nursing imaginary grievances is ended, diversity bureaucracies will take over our colleges and universities, supplanting altogether the goal of higher education.

“Diversity” is the highest goal of students and professors who openly detest those with whom they disagree. These people support the very antithesis of higher education with their withering attacks on free speech. Both in and out of academia, the content of a man’s character is no longer as important as the color of his skin, his sex, his sexual preferences or his political loyalties. That’s a vision that spells tragedy for our nation.

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Why Are Fairfax County Schools Propping Up the Disturbing Trend of Child Activism?

As Climate Inc.'s wonder child Greta Thunberg dominates headlines, the school board in Fairfax County, Va., has decided to grant one day of absence from school to students who participate in political protests. Beginning January 27, students in seventh through twelfth grades will be permitted one excused absence each school year to engage in "civic engagement activities." Parents may fear that schools are trying to turn students into liberal activists, but the true reason behind the new policy may be less nefarious and perhaps even more terrifying.

Students had already taken days off school to attend protests, but the policy had not been formalized, Fairfax County Public Schools Spokeswoman Lucy Caldwell told WTOP. "The school board felt that this was something that could be formalized and wanted to put into writing. There were many students who were engaged and have been engaged and it was decided that it was time to go ahead and put into place," Caldwell said.

Liberal activist groups have long aimed to indoctrinate kids and weaponize them for far-left causes. Greta Thunberg's success is at least partly attributable to her celebrity parents and to a climate industrial complex that has a great deal to gain from her activism. The far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has issued grants to support school activism projects, including one denouncing a state flag as "violent" against Native Americans and another supporting the Green New Deal.

As National Review's Jim Geraghty pointed out, "using teens and children as spokesmen for political causes turns them into a sword and shield; they can make wildly inaccurate comments and false accusations and avoid scrutiny, and any pushback against their statements is construed as 'attacking a child.'" This rhetorical strategy makes children effective pawns in political battles and provides incentives for teachers to spin their classes in a partisan direction.

Yet the true tragedy in the new Fairfax Public Schools policy may have less to do with teachers indoctrinating students and weaponizing education. Many teachers may do this, but most would agree that it is wrong to skew education in the direction of activism.

As Geraghty pointed out, the Fairfax policy "represents a fundamental surrender on the part of educators."

There was a time, not so long ago, that teachers and school administrators would feel comfortable telling political activists of any stripe: “we know you believe that your cause is important; that’s how we feel about educating children. If you want middle-schoolers and high-schoolers to attend your event, please schedule it for after school, on a weekend, or during one of the multiple ‘teacher workdays’ during the year when students are not attending school. We believe that during school hours, children and teens belong in the classroom. This is why we spend money and have staff enforcing truancy.” Fairfax County Public School administrators are now afraid to make that argument. If they do so, they will be denounced by the activist class as insufficiently “woke,” progressive, or aligned with the popular causes of the day. The administrators are afraid to be authority figures, making a decision based upon the best interests of the children in their school system.
A liberal teacher may skew education toward liberal views, and that would be a tragedy. It would arguably be worse if the teacher did not believe in education enough to say "no" to requests for activism. That would be a tragedy of a completely different sort.

As a new parent in the Washington, D.C. area, I am very concerned about the state of local schools. New fads like transgender identity, climate change activism, and opposition to gun rights are increasingly invading public schools and undermining the purpose of education — guiding children toward maturity and truth. School should not teach children to become activists, it should teach them to be citizens. Political movements should be regarded with skepticism, not blind loyalty.

I am increasingly convinced that public schools are not an option for my family, for conservative Christians, or for those who believe in traditional American values like limited government and adherence to the Constitution. Only when teachers believe in education more than activism can schools do what they are supposed to do.

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